In Scandinavia people love IT and smarthphones. It is actually the region in the world where the penetration rate of online and digital services is the highest in the world. So it is normal that they even invented shareville. We are talking of a revolution in the world of online finance: it's a facebook for private investors, a real community to share ideas about trading.

Shareville is an online community organised by the Swedish broker Nordnet where you can find 39,295 stock portfolios for a total value of roughly $1.3 bn. These are the portfolios of a comunity of private investors which are all enthusiats to take their own investment decisions. If you join the service you can rate and follow the best performing portfolios. It's exactly the same way as the pension funds are doing with their Bloomberg terminals, except that it's for free for you, which is way better than having to pay a fat cat pension fund manager ... For instance you can find Gunnar in Stockholm who had a return of +24% during the last 3 month, with the breakdown of his trades and current holdings. Once you that think Gunnar is a really smart guy, you can even decide follow his next moves to get the same returns...

"The number of funds that have beaten the market over their entire histories is so small that the False Discovery Rate test can't eliminate the possibility that the few that did were merely false positives."Russell Wermers, as quoted in "The Prescients are Few", New York Times, July 13, 2008

Precious metals are continuing on their rally. In the long run, gold is definitely going up, but now the price of gold (and silver) has recently been pushed up.

Some say it is because of instability in Ukraine, but honestly Ukraine alone cannot explain the whole thing. The reason why gold is a good investment to consider is that the global economic recovery after the worst financial crisis since World War II seems to be halting. Signs that the economy is not recovering so well are coming from Japan, the US and even China. As a norml consequence people are looking for their favorite good old-fashioned refuge haven: gold and precious metals. And it is not all, in the euphoria of 2013 with a stock rally going up like mad and even strange things such as the bitcoins bubble, people had massively sold gold metal and took money out of their commidity funds and therefore the precious lost much more than it should. Now people are coming back to their senses and we are seeing a normal correction of the price.

When you look at figurers, it is quite clear. Funds in both gold and silver are up 11% this year compared with stocks that return in the returned close to zero in the past two months. The graph taken from a public data from Google Finance shows the striking difference between the returns that you seen in funds that track the gold ($SGOL) and silver ($SLV) prices compared to traditional stock indices Dow Jones and Standard and Poor's S&P500. (you can press on the graph to bereidrect to a site where you can play with the figures).

So how to benefit from this?

I can recommend two very good Exchange-Traded-Funds (ETFs) which offer exposure to precious metals. They have low management fees compared to other funds, and you can trade them online yourself just like stocks in the stock market, which means extremely low commissions to enter and run the fund. What they do is very simple: they buy precious metal and sell the fund units as shares online, so it is really like you'd buy the precious metal yourself, while doing it easily on the New-York Stock Exchange and of course you do not get the hurdle of transporting/storing the metal yourself, which is also nice! These ETFs are:

iShare's Silver Trust ($SLV). iShare is an ETF-specialised firm set as a spin-off of the famous investment company Blackrock. The management is outstanding, the tools that they are using to run their funds are state-of-the-art and because it is automated, the fund can be managed at a much lower fee than what Blackrock usually charges their clients, which is why it such a bargain for investors,

ETF Securities Gold Trust ($SGOL). ETF securities is one of the world's leading, independent exchange-traded product providers, and their funds has received the best critics from various independant sites.

"I have become increasingly convinced that the past records of mutual fund managers are essentially worthless in predicting future success. The few examples of consistently superior performance occur no more frequently than can be expected by chance."Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, 1973

Last year was a very bad time for gold investors. The market went down very steeply... but now it seems that the wind is turning! Year-to-date the ETF $SGOL, which tracks the price of gold bullions, has returned a good 5.25%, which is much better than the stock indices against which most fund managers compare themselved: the Dow Jones returned -4.71% and the S&P500 returned -2.77%. Nobody can tell you for sure why this increase occurred now and not two months ago, but one thing is for sure: in today's economy the central banks of the US and Japan, and much of the rest of the developped world as printing money like crazy. On the other hand the mining industry cannot extract much gold to compensate for this printing of US dollars. So in the long term we will see a very steady increase in the price of this precious metal, which has the particularity to be used as a commodity (or raw material) for the industry and as well as a safe haven refuge currency whenever the economy goes sour.

Do you think that Apple ($AAPL) is overvalued? Well think again. Apple is sitting on a HUGE pile of cash: in the last quarterly report, it reported $159bn US dollars. That is an increase of $12bn or 8.16% compared to the previous quarter, even though Apple has already started to distribute large dividends.

To put things into perspective $159bn is exactly the market valuation of Facebook! Or the valuation of the entire US car industry... Basically Apple has so much cash that the company does not know what to do with it, and the best guess (since there is more cash coming in at the same amazing rate) is that the company will keep on distributing more and more to the shareholders. Apple has now a dividend yield of 2.38% and it is growing. In addition Apple is one of the most actively traded companies in the market with an extremely liquid stock market + derivative markets.